It’s hard to believe that we have almost reached the end of the year. Now is a good time to reflect of how many of the marketing activities you had planned for 2015 have actually been implemented. How much have you increased your brand awareness? How many followers have you gained? How much have you built up your database? How many leads have you generated? How many sales have you closed? Chances are the answer is “not as many as I wanted to”. Frequently, I speak to business owners that have grand plans for their marketing and business growth; but they often get so caught up running the business or are distracted with other priorities that the marketing plan sits on the shelf gathering dust instead of providing the roadmap to marketing and business success. Sure, you start the year with grand plans and big ideas; but getting the details planned out and the activities scheduled and implemented is another story. So what are the keys to successful marketing throughout the year?
- Developing a strategy and plan at the beginning of the year;
- Creating a scheduled marketing roadmap that details the activities to be rolled out, by when and by whom;
- Resourcing it – allocate someone internally to manage your marketing or better yet save dollars and achieve better results by getting a team of experts to manage your marketing by outsourcing to marketing experts like Blaze Marketing.
Time spent planning your marketing, scheduling it and making it someone’s responsibility is time well spent. If you don’t take the time to plan it just won’t happen or it won’t achieve the results you’re hoping for. Adhoc or reactive marketing wastes a lot of time and money and doesn’t achieve optimal results. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” But planning your marketing activities doesn’t have to be a long, complicated process. If you’ve got lots of good ideas you just need to get underway! So take the opportunity during the Christmas/New Year break to start planning, programming and developing your marketing for 2016. To help you get started putting pen on paper, here’s a FREE Action Plan Template as our little Christmas gift to you. Give a Christmas gift to your business – start planning your marketing now and driving results in the coming year or get Blaze Marketing to help with your planning.
